Hugo Rifkind

The most significant bit of Ed Miliband’s speech last week (which I bet you watched in the office, from beginning to end, like I did, because that’s not weird in most jobs at all) was the bit where he called David Cameron an idiot. Did you catch it? Very stirring. ‘Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out-of-touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower?’ he said. As he said it his spine straightened out of that frowning crouch he goes into sometimes, which can make him look as though he’s about to drop a poo on the stage, and he soared up onto his tiptoes. ‘Good on you, Ed Miliband,’ I thought, as the crowd went wild. ‘Bravo.’ It’s not that I agree.

Writing on the Guardian’s website, and perhaps in the paper too, although I’m not wholly sure they still print one (subs, please check), their investigations editor David Leigh has made a bold suggestion for the future of the press. He’s been around, Leigh, and is as dogged a hack as you could hope to find on a newspaper, or whatever, which only prints tits on the arts pages. He’s a bit wobbly on the online side of things, granted (he accidentally gave the entire world access to the full set of unredacted Wikileaks cables by blithely sticking the password in a book), but that’s probably just a function of age. And, like I said, he’s had an idea.

What’s wrong with editing your own Wikipedia entry, anyway? I’ve never touched mine, but only because I’m scared people would find out, which would be bad, although for reasons which elude me. I don’t even know why I’ve got a Wikipedia entry, actually. It was built in 2005, at 1.12a.m., by somebody who appears to have been at Birmingham University. Since then, it has been a lurking presence in my online life, like some chick you’ve never met who goes around telling people she’s your girlfriend. This past week, Grant Shapps, the new co-chairman of the Conservative party, has been ridiculed in numerous papers for editing his. There wasn’t anything ¬≠particularly bad in there beforehand.

Let us talk about politicians dancing. Specifically, let us talk about Boris Johnson and David Cameron dancing to the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony. Graceful, elegant, debonair, all of these things it was not. Cameron clapped, strangled by his tie, like a man whose sober country church has been taken over for a week by some bastard with a guitar. Boris was more relaxed, swinging his belly to the beat as a bountiful chick might swing her boobs. Digging it, like Daddy Pig might dig the DJ at Peppa’s wedding. Did you see? The cameraman held them both for 20 seconds and then moved abruptly on. ‘This isn’t funny,’ a producer might have told him. ‘This is like watching them on the loo.’ And my response came in stages.

Jetlagged in the small-hour darkness of Santa Monica last week, and perusing various write-ups of the previous evening’s Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan, I had a sudden epiphany as to why America holds all these sporting contests with ‘world’ in the title which don’t involve anybody else. It’s because everybody else is dreadful. Eurovision has been dreadful for so long that this has almost become the point, and any act these days which doesn’t feature a singer who looks like the mistress of a warlord who can only visit the same countries as Roman Polanski doesn’t have a hope.

Find me a person who stopped voting Conservative last week because of David Cameron’s vague, half-arsed, lacklustre stance on gay marriage. Go on. I dare you. Or because of the even vaguer, totally-not-going-to-happen proposals to reform the House of Lords. I’ll settle for one of them instead. Just one, and then I’ll shut up and leave you alone. Anyone? Anyone? Oh, look, there’s probably one. Maybe there are even as many as eight. And I don’t really want to meet them. They’re representative of nothing. ‘But the Ukip vote soared!’ I hear you cry. ‘Their share of the vote is five points higher than a year ago!’ Yes, indeed.

There’s a big hole in the coalition’s controversial internet surveillance plans, and it comes in the shape of the point. Right now, you see, everybody is ­making a fuss about civil liberties. This is because making a fuss about civil liberties is a blast. Once you work up a decent head of steam, any fool can do it. It’s sixth-form debating society stuff. This House Believes That Freedom Is More Important Than Security, sort of thing. This is the sound of intellectually lazy people returning to their comfort zones. Look, I understand civil liberties. A leader in the Times put it best, the other week, when it said, ‘Civil liberties are the rights of individuals in the free world to not have to trust in the good intentions or the competence of authorities.

It’s not strange that bankers have so much more money than anybody else. It’s like the way that women who work in sweet shops are always fat. Not a profound point, I’ll grant you, but it’s striking how rarely you see it made. In other industries, this sort of thing is pretty much a given. If you went around to Christian Louboutin’s house, you wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs Louboutin had an unusually vast number of shoes, would you? Sure, there might not be a Mrs Louboutin; not a punt I’d like to make with a French shoe designer, but you get the point. People who work in theatre get a lot of theatre tickets, and people who work in banks get a lot of cash. They’re swimming in the stuff. It all goes through them.